Hey guys - after a friend at work saw the correction I did on my buddy's truck, she said to sign her up for a detail. It was on a 2005 Toyota Celica, with metal flake light blue paint. I thought it might be really hard to get it to turn out nicely, because the flake in the paint is so incredibly dense that that's all you can see in the sunlight. Also, it made it very hard to see swirls in the paint and if I had done a good enough job correcting them or not. In the end however, I was very happy with how it turned out.
Since this was the first one I have ever done for money, I said I'd do it for $100. The interior was quite clean to start, so I just spent about an hour vacuuming it and giving it a quick detail, including cleaning the steering wheel leather and treating the surfaces and glass. The exterior took 6 hours (I'm new at this still, and slow).
The outside of the car got a wash and polish, and then all the trim, glass, chrome and wheels got their respective products. I used Zaino stuff again for polish, but just as I was finishing the very last detail on the exterior my new Autogeek order showed up, so the next time I will be using XMT360 to see how that works, and waxing with some S100.
The hardest part of this was taking pictures that made the car look as good as it did in real life. It was like trying to capture how good silver looks because of all the flake, and in person the car looked like it had three layers of paint on it - a light blue base, metal flake floating on that, and a super slick clearcoat on top of it all. The car looked very clean and very sharp. When she came to pick it up, I saw her truck pull into my driveway but no one came to the door for 2-3 minutes. I finally walked outside and she was just staring at the car because she couldn't believe how good it looked. That made me feel a lot better because I was scared I wouldn't be able to make it look good enough to justify the cost. No worries though - she called again today to tell me how great the car looked and that she didn't really want to sell it now because it looked brand new. *whew* Pictures!
Here's the car when I got it initially.
Interior before:
Interior after:
There were two spots that she wanted me to correct specifically. One was where someone had nicked her car with their door:
The other was a dull spot on the driver side fender. It had been like this since she bought it used a year ago (on a one year-old car!!!). Turned out to be some nasty oxidation.
I clayed the car and nothing was that bad except for the oxidized spot. The clay even corrected the door ding - it was just some paint left behind from the other car. The oxidized spot alone did this to the clay after three strokes across it:
Wheels before washing:
Finished wheels with DP Wheel Cleaner, DP Wheel Glaze, Mother's Chrome Polish and Z16 Perfect Tire Gloss. I want to try the Surf City tire dressing next as I hear it gives a similar matte shine to the tires.
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) and three coats of Z5 polish. I used Stoner's Invisible Glass, Stoner's More Shine in the wheelwells and engine compartment, Surf City Killer Chrome on the metal trim, and Mother's Back to Black on the black trim. Hopefully these pictures convey how amazing it looked, but I doubt it. I think I need a new camera! 
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